I have nothing to say about the quality of writing in this book, but I found the story very unpleasant, for some reason--probably the chilliness of Vivian Gornick's "marriage." I had to read it in a creative writing course as an example of a memoir, and I disliked it so intensely that after the semester, I disposed of it. Until then, I didn't realize how hard laminated covers made it for trade paperbacks to burn. From the overall tone of the book, Gornick comes off as the coldest Marxist since Bertolt Brecht.